by Vic Tyler
Then Brie stretched her neck, shook herself off, and started jumping and stretching.
“It’s my necklace,” she declared. “I’ll do whatever I want with it.”
I smiled, watching her run around again. It was amazing how Brie’s feelings were still so strong after all these years. I admired her tenacity, and in a lot of ways, she held the standard for what I saw as true love. Anyone would be lucky to be on the receiving end of Brie’s love, and Grant was a downright fool for not seeing that.
Benji popped in my mind, his words from the other day ringing in my head, bringing my spirits down a little bit. Would I also suffer the same fate? What if I wasn’t able to stop my feelings for Benji from cascading into something more dangerous? Would I find myself longing for him years from now? Would I ever be able to find someone else that made me feel like he did?
What’ll happen to me after I leave BAYRE?
chapter six
Somewhere Only We Know – Keane
“T aking a plane to Maine seems a bit over the top for a location scout,” Maria said carefully.
I grunted.
The asshole went ahead and closed the studio a day early, changed the locks, booked two tickets to Maine, and sent me an email saying exactly that. I was banking on the fact Grant wouldn’t find out until later, but…
Sigh.
Not to mention, he had the nerve to end it with ‘Toodle–oo, happy birthday, use protection, much love. – Mom.’
I think I really might kill him one day.
But I should’ve known it wouldn’t end there. Why I kept underestimating Grant Bayer was beyond my understanding.
Maria and I arrived at the car rental, and the worker drove out a Lamborghini, insisting that’s what the reservation was changed to.
The employee fidgeted uncomfortably as I cursed at a spiritually present Grant, throwing in a couple of death threats. He didn’t argue when I insisted on taking the Nissan Xterra, telling them to keep the payment for the upgrade.
Once the actual car we’d be renting came out, Maria and I ended up sitting in there for ten minutes while I had to sit back and take a breather from the day’s ridiculous events.
Maria was having difficulty managing her giggle fit, so I helped her smother them by occupying her mouth otherwise.
We had to stop by the grocery store first, making sure we got enough provisions and those s’mores that Maria wanted. The employees there got annoyed by us when we raced our carts down the aisles and argued loudly about what snacks to buy. Maria was a little glutton when it came to her sweets, and I probably indulged her more than I should have.
It was a short drive to the national park. Maria and I argued about what music to put on, but our voices slowly faded as the scenery around us changed into tree trunks and green curtains.
Maria was practically stuck to the window, her head speedily turning every which way as she tried to look at everything. It was amusing and we weren’t in a rush, so I slowed the car down a little.
When we got to the parking lot and started our hike, Maria moved at a snail’s pace, stopping every so often to gape at the forest and the green canopy that fluttered above us. Even though I generally appreciated the scenery, watching Maria gave me a second opportunity to experience it all for the first time.
It was weird hiking with someone else. Being here with someone else. In the past I used to revel in the solitude of the mountain, away from the noise of the city and the people. But when I was planning this trip, I remembered Maria saying she’d never been camping, and it crossed my mind that I would enjoy her company.
We stopped at a flat bend to take a break, setting down our gear on some nearby boulders. I took out my Hasselblad, a camera I was excited to try out, not having had the chance to experiment with it yet. It was a special sponsorship they offered, but it was a slow camera, making it difficult to use in most shoots.
“Turn your head a little to the left, and relax your foot. Stay like that,” I ordered.
Maria blushed a little and fidgeted self–consciously, stopping only when I glared at her.
“I’m pretty sure I came here as an assistant,” she said.
“You’re assisting me by modeling,” I said.
It felt a little low to pretend like I was using her as a model while scouting locations, but I didn’t want to tell her she was my muse for and in the visions I wanted to capture here.
“It feels weird being on this side of the camera,” she said, her gaze flying up, distracted by flying birds.
“It’s nothing new from the other times we scouted locations.”
Maria looked at me, cocking her head. Got that on camera now. “What do you like about being out here?”
“Change in scenery.”
“Besides that.” She rolled her eyes. “That’s a given.”
“It’s familiar, even when I go to different places,” I said, mostly focusing on my viewfinder than the conversation. “It’s the closest thing I have to a home.”
“Why?” Maria furrowed her brows.
“I used to log in Michigan, and I slept outside most of the time,” I said. “It was more comfortable than being in any foster home.”
“Why did you run away from your last foster home?”
Even though it was years ago and I felt safe here — in the mountains, especially knowing I always had New York to return to — dredging up those old memories was still bitterly painful. There were a lot of burdens and scars to unpack, and I preferred to keep that box tightly shut and chained, screwed down, shoved into the darkest depths out of sight.
I didn’t realize that the longer I was taking to answer, Maria’s face gradually grew guiltier and more nervous.
“My foster dad and I fought a lot, and it just got annoying so I left,” I said, picking up my pack again. “So stop looking like you killed a puppy or something.”
We got moving. Since this was my first time in this national park, I shared the excitement of exploring with Maria. We stopped more times than we should’ve before arriving at our campsite.
The site was deserted in a large clearing. We set up our equipment up and sat around, sampling the snacks we bought earlier. It was way later than I had anticipated arriving at the campsite, but hell, we had all weekend and I was having fun. I was almost grateful to Grant for the extra day off. Almost.
There was a small lake not too far from us, so we took it easy and decided to sit around and fish for a couple of hours. Maria squirmed about the bait, but she was a quick learner, which I already knew.
“So how did you meet Grant?” Maria asked, leaning her head between my shoulder blades. We were sitting on some protruded rock, back to back. It would’ve been neat to get that picture.
“He found me in Michigan,” I said, absentmindedly reeling in the line. Oops. “We went to the same high school, but we weren’t friends. We never even talked. But somehow he found me a year after I ran away. A teacher we knew asked him to find me apparently. And Grant propositioned a business partnership. Said he’d manage a studio while I photographed. Sounded like bullshit, so I told him to fuck off. But he stuck around for a while until I changed my mind.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Grant,” Maria said. “But whoa, we had that one degree of separation between us even back then, huh?”
I tilted my head back until it was leaning on the top of her head. “Weird.”
“I wonder what would’ve happened if we met earlier,” Maria mused.
My heart ached, wishing that we had. But there had been too much going on, and I doubted that we would’ve gotten along.
“You wouldn’t have even looked at me.” I watched birds soar above us, in their V formation. “It was a different time.”
Maria laughed. “Oh, please. I was a cello nerd. With your penchant for women, you wouldn’t have noticed me.”
“I would’ve noticed you.”
Her body stilled. The surface of the water rippled as a fish dipped its lips past its watery
home. Birds chirped and whistled in the labyrinth of trees next to us. And Maria breathed softly, her back rising and falling against mine.
Once the orange haze started illuminating the lake, we packed up and headed back to the camp, where we made a fire and had a simple dinner with bread, sausages, and eggs. Maria wolfed down her plate, much to my amusement, and she scrambled to get to our last untouched grocery bag.
“I’ve never had s’mores before,” Maria chirped, eagerly sticking five marshmallows on a long branch.
“Whoa, how many are you planning on eating?”
I grabbed her stick and took four of them off. She pouted and then looked at the bag of groceries we bought earlier.
“All of them?” She furrowed her brow and then looked at me, smiling. “Yupp, all of them.”
“I’m not going to help you if you drown in a puddle of marshmallow.”
“I’ll eat my way out,” she said, her eyes sparkling from the anticipation and the crackling fire.
“You’ll be in the news tomorrow. I can see the headlines now: ‘Death by Marshmallow; S’mores no more’s,’” I snickered, leaning back against the wooden log behind me.
“So lame. Besides, you wouldn’t let me die.” Maria squealed as her marshmallow caught on fire.
I blew it out and pulled the burnt layer off. Maria was amazed at the white goo melting off of her stick. She started excitedly stacking her s’more together. I’d never seen anyone else so enthusiastic about those little treats.
Not that I made them all that often myself. I tried it when I went camping by myself the first time, but it was unmemorable. Maybe the appeal was in making them with someone else. Maybe it was just Maria.
“Aren’t you eating any?” Her words were muffled by her round cheeks stuffed with the crushed graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate.
“Yeah, I’ll have some.”
There was a little white trail of marshmallow hanging from the edge of her mouth. I leaned over and put my lips over her mouth, sucking the sweet strand of sugar. She blushed and I cupped her face, turning it towards me.
Her lips were chocolatey with the coating of sticky marshmallow and prickled with cracker crumbs. She tasted like s’mores, and in this exact moment, it became my favorite taste.
Maybe I wouldn’t like it in the future, but if Maria was in my future, anything she tasted of at the moment would be the one I couldn’t live without.
I pulled away, brushing my thumb over her flushed red bottom lip. I grabbed her hand and popped the rest of her half–eaten s’more into my mouth.
“Thanks,” I laughed. She mock–tackled me, jumping and pinning me down.
“This is for my fallen s’more. May it rest in peace,” she said solemnly.
Her small, light hands clumsily pinned my hands above my head. If she thought she could hold me down, she was sorely mistaken. I was tempted to flip her over and make sure she wouldn’t mistake the soreness she’d feel in her body afterwards for anything else other than what I was going to do to her.
The flickering flames cast whips of orange and yellow light across Maria’s face. She glowed with a warm crackling illumination, her long dark hair draping down the side. Then the image of her bare body, riding me in front of this fire with the dark forest as our backdrop and the moon peering down on us filled my mind. God, she was beautiful.
“So,” Maria started slowly. “Why don’t you like celebrating your birthday?”
I froze.
What?
Oh, fuck. That shithead Grant. I scowled.
Of course, he would’ve told her if he knew she was coming on the trip with me.
“I don’t care about my birthday. I would’ve forgotten about it if Grant didn’t shut down the studio every year.”
“That’s sad,” Maria said softly.
Her hands left my wrists, sliding down to touch my cheeks. I grabbed her wrist and pressed my lips to her palm.
“Not really.” I shrugged. “There aren’t any good memories of it. So celebrating it is a worse occasion.”
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?” Maria cautiously peered at me.
I nuzzled my mouth against my hand. Each of my my past birthdays, the ones I remembered, flashed through my head The memories threatened to pour out, but Maria’s touch grounded me, reminding me of the present.
I squeezed her hand as I stared into the fire.
“None of my birthdays were particularly memorable,” I started slowly. There were no cakes or candles or any of the things I’d seen on TV. At best, some candy. At worst, being ignored. Which was never so bad.
“But my twelfth birthday —” the words felt dry and foreign in my mouth. “— was when my foster mom came into my room at night and told me she’d make me a man.”
Maria’s back stiffened, and she sat straight, looking down incredulously. I didn’t look directly at her, suddenly afraid to see the look in her eyes. Would it be pity? Disgust? Would she see me as dirty now? Damaged? Defiled?
“And then she kept coming back, and she said it would be our little secret. But a couple years later, she felt like ‘rewarding’ me when I turned fourteen. And that’s when her husband found us.”
The reel flipped in my head, and my voice flatly narrated it all. The fear, anger, disgust, confusion unleashed, replaying the emotions I struggled with at the time.
“And then he started getting violent. I was beaten, tied down, starved, kicked around, and whatever his tiny imagination was capable of. He did it more to hurt her than to hurt me, and he left the bruises and scars where they couldn’t be easily seen most of the time.”
My stomach twisted, and I suddenly felt hot and nauseous. I sat up, firmly moving Maria off of me. My chest felt compressed and crushed, but I couldn’t stop the words from coming out.
“But after the days he drank, I’d go to school with a black eye or a broken wrist or something. Martin was a random teacher who came up and started talking to me like we knew each other. I ignored him for a while, but he was persistent. Eventually, he convinced me to take his photography class and lent me a camera to use since I couldn’t afford one. After a while, I confided in him about what happened at home, and he was the one who told me that wasn’t normal.”
It was like I could see it all happening in front of me. I shut my eyes tightly, covering them with my hands as though that would block it all out.
“I told him I didn’t want him to talk to my foster dad or the authorities since I was close to graduating. By that time, my foster dad stopped hitting me since I was bigger and stronger than him. I still lived in fear at the time, just anticipating the next hit, not knowing when he’d explode. And then on my seventeenth birthday, Martin gifted me my first DSLR. It was the first time I got a present. I was so excited.”
It was the first time I felt happiness, like my birthday was something worth celebrating. Then it was all dashed.
“Later that night, my foster dad started ripping my room apart. He found the camera and destroyed it, yelling about how some teacher called him and told him I was interested in photography and that I should be allowed to pursue it. He tried hitting me, and for the first time, I fought back. I was so angry I couldn’t control myself.”
Maria pulled on my hands, and I was startled to see Maria’s eyes full of tears. She got on her knees and pulled my head into her chest, embracing me tightly. I breathed in deeply between her breasts, her warm vanilla scent bringing me back to her.
“I’m not proud of what I did. It still haunts me, but I don’t regret it either. I ran away that night, without a single thing on me. Apparently, he was hospitalized and in pretty bad condition, but I haven’t seen or heard from him since. After I left, I wandered around for a while. I didn't have anything on me. But a trucker took pity on me and said he was heading up to Michigan, and he had a friend who worked up there who could give me work to keep afloat. It was hard work but decent pay, and the guys I worked with accepted me into their circle. That’s where Gr
ant found me a year later. I’d seen him around school, but we were on opposite ends of the spectrum in every way. So when he told me to partner with him, I thought he was crazy — barely out of school with his dad's platinum credit card.”
A dry, hollow laugh escaped my throat. I still remembered walking into the office, barely able to believe my eyes. Golden Boy Grant Bayer. That bright blond hair, like a walking beacon, on a younger Grant. Dressed like he was attending a Christmas charity at the White House, beaming that disgustingly fake smile, standing around a bunch of burly lumberjacks in a dingy, dirty little office.
“Grant handed me a camera and said it was from Martin, saying he was worried and asking me to call him. But Martin sold me out, turned my life upside down, so I told Grant to fuck off and leave me alone. But he was Grant. Relentless to a fault. He stuck around for six months until I finally agreed to give it a try on the condition he’d never mention Martin again.”
That out–of–place rich bastard showing up everyday, following me around after paying the manager off to leave him be. But we ended up sitting and talking, and some of Grant’s facade faded, making me reconsider his proposition. The smile he gave me when I told him I’d try working with him — it was the most genuine I’d ever seen on his face, even up until today.
“But as is Grant’s fashion, he made me sign some bullshit contract that I realized was crazy way too late. He made me get my GED, paid for me to go to college, and used his connections to help get me first–hand experience. And because of the contract, I couldn’t quit or leave under an absurdly high penalty.”
I scowled. Yet here I was, still letting the same asshole push me around. Maria nuzzled her head into my hair, and I wrapped my arms around her.
“It was a couple years later when Grant broke his promise — on my birthday — and told me that Martin was dying. He didn’t have long to live, and apparently, he had asked to see me one last time. So I went, still bitter but no longer angry. And that’s when Martin told me that he had called my foster dad to ask about adopting me but that things went bad before he could talk to me about it. That’s also when I took the picture you have — the one Grant gave you. It was the first and only picture I took of Martin. He didn’t have much, but he left me some of his possessions, including all his cameras and equipment. I regret not seeing him earlier. I regret not being able to thank him earlier.”